Foodie Friday | French Onion Soup & Quinoa Superfood Salad

This post is going to be about two new recipes I tried this week, one was a glorious hit, and the other was just fair to medium. I'll start with the Slow-Cooker Sunday recipe from last week which was French Onion Soup. Apparently, I picked the worst week ever to make a hearty, warm-the-belly soup. I have a feeling that this soup would have been better received on a rainy winter night, but last Saturday it was sunny and warm, so it didn't really feel right. It only tasted okay, too. It wasn't mind-blowing. The bread and cheese was really the best part, which was unfortunate.

The worst part was that we didn't eat any of the leftovers. None. I'm going to blame it on the 95 degree, Santa Ana wind weather that we have had all this last week, which for us in Southern California is just excruciating. It's so hot, there's zero percent humidity, 50 mph winds, and wildfires. Not exactly soup weather. So, bad planning on my part. Tomorrow's Slow-Cooker Saturday is going to be pulled pork because that's more summery (even though it looks like the temps are now going to drop to the low 60s - but whatever, I can't plan meals around the weather!). We also might have some people over to watch the first Ducks/Kings playoff hockey game so a bowl of shredded meat sounds like a good idea.

I figured I'd still go ahead and put the recipe for the French onion soup on here, because in the end it is a decent recipe. It probably needs some tweaking, or I might just try a whole different recipe altogether, but for my first try at making any kind of soup from scratch, it did taste okay. I suggest trying this for a winter's day, however. This is not a summer recipe.

The recipe can be found here on sixtyone45.com and is labeled as Beer & Balsamic French Onion Soup. In addition to beer and balsamic vinegar, it includes four different kinds of onions... so what could go wrong, right? Nothing, really. I opted for veggie stock instead of beef just to keep it vegetarian for me. I'm sure some people probably think this is sacrilege but I think it's fine.

So, like I said, beer, balsamic vinegar, four kinds of onions, and then there's garlic, some butter, brown sugar, fresh thyme, flour, and veggie stock. You top it with bread and cheese after it's done, too. Simple ingredients for the most part. Although, I did have to google how to handle fresh thyme. I've never used it before and all the tiny leaves confused me. Do I try to pluck them off one-by-one? Chop up the stems? I didn't know, but I found this very helpful video on YouTube. Once that dilemma was solved, I got to cooking. 

The first step is to basically caramelize the onions and garlic in the crockpot. I could have stopped right at this step and just eaten the big bowl of onions, honestly. But I know not everyone loves onions the way I do. I put them in just about everything and can eat them like apples. But I digress... 

Put all the chopped onion, garlic, butter, brown sugar, and balsamic vinegar into the crockpot, with the temperature set to high:

Let's just pause for a moment and look at this thing of beauty:

Stir it all up:

And let the onions brown for at least an hour, stirring every so often:

 Here are my onions after about an hour and fifteen minutes:

Next you add in the flour, and then stir that up into the onions:

Then add in all the remaining ingredients, including the beer! I used Newcastle Brown Ale. I bought a large single beer (I'm not a big beer drinker so I didn't see the value in buying a six pack) so I measured out 12oz for the soup and then drank the rest of it!

Note that you also turn down the crockpot to low at this point and then cook for 6-8 hours. Here it is with the broth, beer and thyme added in, it's all stirred up and ready to slow cook:

I should point out that already, just from the onions cooking, the house smelled amazing. Nothing like last week's nauseating, overwhelming peanut butter smell from the satay. This was a delicious smell, and one I welcomed! I think cooking onions and garlic might be my favorite food smell.

Here we are after about three hours of cooking away:

Here it is at 5 hours, not a whole heck of a difference in the look to it, really:

And this is it when I declared it done at about 6 1/2 hours, mostly because I was just hungry and ready to eat at this point:

Since I didn't have "oven safe" bowls, or at least I didn't know if I did or not and didn't want to have another measuring cup fiasco (don't ask), I decided to just slice up some cheese and melt it onto toasted slices of crusty bread in the toaster oven and then plop it into my soup. I prefer having loads of cheese melting over the side of the bowl, but hey, sometimes you just gotta make due. I also used fancy, expensive gruyere cheese and next time would definitely just go for some swiss, just to save money. Although the expensive gruyere is amazing.

So, that's pretty much it with this one. We both liked the bites that had bread and cheese, the soup itself without the bread and cheese just tasted a little too bitter on its own. And by the time it was done, neither of us were really in the mood for it! But I'm sure I'll try this again, hopefully on a rainy, cold day next time!

 

As for my second experiment of the week, I made a recipe called "Superfood Salad with Lemon Vinaigrette" that I found on Pinterest. This thing was KILLER and I highly recommend it! The recipe is here on IowaGirlEats.com (I'm just now noticing that there are a load of other good looking recipes on her site, so I might be digging in a little deeper there!). Unfortunately, I didn't take any good photos of this one, but the next time I make it (as early as next week I would imagine) I will take step-by-step photos. I didn't really expect it to be so delicious, to be honest, so I was unprepared. I thought it would just be healthy and edible at best. But I was wrong!

I did snap a cell phone pic of it while I was eating it, though, so you can get the gist.

This recipe introduced me to a whole new ingredient that I've never tried before: quinoa! (For those of you who only know this word from the football tailgating commercial, it's pronounced KEEN-wah) I feel like this is becoming one of those "trendy" health foods like kale and I'm seeing it everywhere now (also like kale). But the good thing is, unlike kale, it's really delicious! Okay, kale isn't that bad, really. I like it in juice. Quinoa is really wonderful, though and I'm sure I'll be making it all the time now. I greatly prefer it to brown rice, and there are so many interesting recipes out there, including using it as a breakfast cereal!

Now, this recipe is super easy, it's just a matter of mixing things together. I'll give you a few of the shortcuts that I used. First of all, I bought pre-made frozen quinoa from Trader Joe's. I will definitely make it from scratch in the future, but for now this is the easiest for me. I went that route because I had never had it before and if I screwed it up, I'd have no idea. I would just think it's supposed to taste like burnt popcorn or whatnot. So, this way it was fool-proof.

I also bought pomegranate seeds at Trader Joe's, sans tough outer container. These were already plucked from the delicate innards of the pomegranate fruit and put into a simple plastic container for me, ready to dump into the salad. Easy-peasy! Bad for the environment with all that packaging, but who really wants to spend an hour digging seeds out of the pomegranate?? Don't skip the seeds, either. They were arguably the best part of the dish.

What I would probably leave out next time was the orange. It was just a little too much fruit in there for my taste. The pomegranate seeds were enough. The mix of the garlicky-lemon vinaigrette just didn't really go well with the oranges in my opinion, and I found myself avoiding them as I was eating. But if you love oranges, by all means, throw them in there. I can see myself adding in different veggies to this dish, too. I'm not sure what just yet, but I'd imagine you could toss in whatever vegetables you happen to have in your fridge at the moment and it would work out just fine!

The other thing I would absolutely do differently is put the avocado on top as a garnish, rather than mix it in. Not only does it turn the whole consistency of the dish into a paste, but it gets that brownish tint to it and just doesn't look pretty. Besides, I like biting into a chunk of avocado, not just mashing it up into my quinoa. The shrimp were a great touch, too, and I would add in more of those next time, probably grilling them on the BBQ after marinating them in the lemon vinaigrette for a while.

That the wrap up of this week's new dishes. Like I said, tomorrow's Slow Cooker Saturday is pulled pork so it's already in my fridge prepped with rub:

So nasty! Haha, I'm still not used to the idea of eating meat just yet. And I don't know if I'll ever get used to seeing a raw hunk of animal in my fridge. But, my man can't survive on healthy, vegetarian meals alone. Every now and then I'm going to have to just bite the bullet and cook him some MEAT! Wish me luck!

[ j. ]